Abstract
Industrial contaminants accumulated in Arctic permafrost regions have been largely neglected in existing climate impact analyses. Here we identify about 4500 industrial sites where potentially hazardous substances are actively handled or stored in the permafrost-dominated regions of the Arctic. Furthermore, we estimate that between 13,000 and 20,000 contaminated sites are related to these industrial sites. Ongoing climate warming will increase the risk of contamination and mobilization of toxic substances since about 1100 industrial sites and 3500 to 5200 contaminated sites located in regions of stable permafrost will start to thaw before the end of this century. This poses a serious environmental threat, which is exacerbated by climate change in the near future. To avoid future environmental hazards, reliable long-term planning strategies for industrial and contaminated sites are needed that take into account the impacts of cimate change.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 1721 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-11 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Nature Communications |
| Volume | 14 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 28 Mar 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We acknowledge the support of Michael Auer from the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) for providing the OSMlanduse data. We thank Simone Stuenzi and Stephan Jacobi for supporting us with the graphical design of the figures. We acknowledge the support of Christina Himmelsbach for her support with the analysis of the contaminated site data. This work was supported by a grant from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) awarded to M.L. (project PermaRisk, grant no. 01LN1709A). The work was also supported by the IceRoads project funded by the AWI Innovations Fonds (Innovation Project IP10200006). S.W. acknowledges funding through Nunataryuk (EU Grant agreement no. 773421) and ESA Permafrost CCI ( https://climate.esa.int/en/projects/permafrost/ ). R.Rolph was supported by the Geo.X, the Research Network for Geosciences in Berlin and Potsdam (Grant no. SO_087_GeoX). G.G. acknowledges support from EU Arctic Passion.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s).
Funding
We acknowledge the support of Michael Auer from the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) for providing the OSMlanduse data. We thank Simone Stuenzi and Stephan Jacobi for supporting us with the graphical design of the figures. We acknowledge the support of Christina Himmelsbach for her support with the analysis of the contaminated site data. This work was supported by a grant from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) awarded to M.L. (project PermaRisk, grant no. 01LN1709A). The work was also supported by the IceRoads project funded by the AWI Innovations Fonds (Innovation Project IP10200006). S.W. acknowledges funding through Nunataryuk (EU Grant agreement no. 773421) and ESA Permafrost CCI ( https://climate.esa.int/en/projects/permafrost/ ). R.Rolph was supported by the Geo.X, the Research Network for Geosciences in Berlin and Potsdam (Grant no. SO_087_GeoX). G.G. acknowledges support from EU Arctic Passion.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| AWI Innovations Fonds | IP10200006 |
| ESA Permafrost CCI | |
| EU Arctic Passion | |
| Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology | |
| Nunataryuk | |
| European Commission | 773421 |
| European Commission | |
| Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung | 01LN1709A |
| Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung |